WASHINGTON—With the rapid growth in artificial intelligence (AI), data centers are proliferating across the United States and prompting backlash from some voters.
While data center advocates have emphasized their economic value and strategic importance in the AI race with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to set global standards, many Americans who spoke with The Epoch Times voiced skepticism about their impact on energy costs, water, and other concerns driving debate ahead of the midterms on Nov. 3.
Although some surveys suggest that data centers and related topics are lower on American voters’ priority lists than some other concerns, a recent Pew Research Center poll found that most Americans now believe data centers are generally detrimental to the environment and home energy costs.
In certain places, such as Ohio, the data center debate has surfaced in political campaigns and ballot measures.
“The community concerns and the pushback and the questions—it’s all real,” Steve Everley of FTI Consulting, a strategic communications firm that works with the data center industry, told The Epoch Times in an interview.
The election results could impact Congress’s approach to regulating AI, including whether it would codify President Donald Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge. Trump, who has championed the building of data centers in America, touted the voluntary promise by companies to ensure that consumers do not inadvertently pay for the power-delivery upgrades needed by data centers.
The Senate and Ohio Governor’s Mansion
In recent years, midwestern Rust Belt states that were once U.S. manufacturing hubs have attracted significant data center development. Ohio is one of them.
The Buckeye State has more than 200 data centers statewide—the fifth-highest count in the United States.
Data center developers often target communities that were once key manufacturing and industrial hubs, political communications strategist James Christopher told The Epoch Times.
This year, ballot measures in communities across Ohio generally seek to restrict data center development. A statewide ballot initiative that would restrict the construction or expansion of larger data centers did not make it onto the 2026 ballot but could end up on the 2027 ballot.
Democrats, looking to flip a Senate seat and secure their candidate to the governor’s mansion in a state that Trump has comfortably won three times, have seized on the opportunity to attack the GOP for supporting tax breaks for data center expansion across Ohio.
In his battle to return to the U.S. Senate against Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio), former Democratic senator Sherrod Brown has spent millions on ads attacking his opponent over his past support of these tax incentives.
Husted has been the face of the Ratepayer Protection Act. He introduced it in the Senate.
It passed in the House with overwhelming support from both parties but fell short in the Senate, where it drew just a handful of Democratic votes. Senate Democrats argued that the bill does not go far enough, as it lets states decide whether to mandate those standards rather than compelling them to do so.
During a campaign stop in early October, Husted told The Epoch Times that critics were wrong about his bill, noting that nearly all House Democrats voted to pass it.
“Ohioans now know that I’m fighting for them to make the data centers accountable and [to] lower electric rates,” he said.
Data centers were mentioned in 10 percent of political ads for the Ohio Senate race, according to an analysis from data center advocacy group Infrastructure for America—making it a relative outlier among the battleground races they tracked. In other states, this figure was much lower.
Ohio Voters
According to an Oct. 22 poll from the Ohio Northern University Institute for Civics and Public Policy, 55 percent of Ohioans oppose data center construction outright. An even larger group—65 percent—oppose tax incentives for data centers.
Husted is not the only Ohio Republican who was forced to go on the defensive over AI and data centers.
Democratic governor candidate Amy Acton has called for a “conditional moratorium” that would compel data centers to use union labor, pay for their utility costs, and adhere to environmental regulations. She has run ads tying her Republican opponent, Vivek Ramaswamy, to past statements praising data centers.
Ramaswamy now says he only supports building data centers on abandoned industrial sites and wants the companies to cover their utility costs and follow environmental rules.
Republican Michael Schaefer told The Epoch Times at a Ramaswamy campaign event in Wauseon, Ohio, that this was “exactly what I wanted to hear from him” on data center expansion.
Some Ohioans passionately oppose building data centers. One of them is Dan Shadrake, an IT consultant and independent voter who lives in Cleveland.
“Takes up too many resources, too many giveaways, taxes. Definitely ups the power demand in Ohio, which then increases prices for everybody else in Ohio,” Shadrake said of data centers to The Epoch Times, adding that he would like to see the government regulate the AI industry.
Some voters are also frustrated by what they see as Washington’s reluctance to regulate the nascent industry.
“Public schools are regulated. Cars are regulated. Why should data centers not be regulated? That’s not good government,” Ellen Brown, an independent voter from Cleveland, told The Epoch Times.
Others, including industrial engineer Deb Cook, are satisfied with Trump’s push for self-regulation in the sector. The Republican told The Epoch Times that data centers and AI are not among her top 10 issues in this year’s election.
One of data centers’ most vocal proponents, Trump warned in August that communities rejecting data centers risk winding up “backwards and poor.”
In an October post on Truth Social, he repeated that data centers have agreed to provide their own electricity, addressing the concerns about increased power costs and risks to the power grid.
“If companies want to make their data centers popular, pay the community, and/or individuals within the community—a ‘dividend,’” he recommended to industry. “Make deals, and get them built!”
Texas
Data centers and related issues have made a mark on Texas’s expensive and competitive Senate race.
The Democratic nominee, state Rep. James Talarico, has called for data centers to finance grid buildouts needed to support their power demands and for an end to the tax breaks that facilitate their construction. He also advocated for minimum federal standards for the systems. He also wants to mandate technologies to curb water pollution and usage.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee, has also been monitoring the impact of data centers. In an October letter, he announced an investigation of data center developments, focusing on their adherence to Texas law and, more narrowly, their completion of a state audit tracking industry water use.
In August, he released a data center plan that he argued would help the United States stay ahead of the CCP on AI, while “protecting our culture and land and safeguarding our families and communities.”
Still, data centers featured in only 3 percent of political ads in Texas’s Senate race, according to Infrastructure for America.
On the ground in Texas, skepticism of data centers spanned the ideological spectrum.
Glenn Vallejo, a Paxton supporter at a rally for the candidate in Killeen, told The Epoch Times he fears that data centers and AI, like Flock cameras, will enable the unlawful tracking of law-abiding citizens. He worries the technologies open the door to turning the United States into “a surveillance state,” like communist Cuba, where his parents are from.
Both Vallejo and Daniel Garcia, a Talarico supporter who was protesting Paxton’s Killeen rally, told The Epoch Times they were concerned about data centers’ water and energy use.
“With AI, man, we ain’t gonna be around here in ten years,” Vallejo said of his fears that in the worst case scenario, AI poses an existential threat to human life.
Cami Castro, who was hiking near the Lower McKinney Falls in Austin, was troubled by data centers’ apparent effect on a key natural resource.
“Texas is prone to water crisis,” she told The Epoch Times. “I think anything that can contribute to a water crisis is something that should potentially be regulated.”
Allyson Marin, a Talarico supporter at a rally for him in San Marcos, was unpersuaded by the argument that the AI competition with communist China means the United States must build, saying politicians seem selective about when they invoke the CCP as a threat.
“We get so much stuff from China anyway,” she told The Epoch Times. “You only bring in China when the argument is, ‘Oh, they’re communists. They’re going to spy on us.’ But the clothes we’re wearing are probably from China.”
Also in San Marcos, Roy, a disaffected young voter who supports neither Paxton nor Talarico, told The Epoch Times the growth in data centers would come on top of large-scale developments that, in his view, have marred the state’s physical landscape.
“That’s just the natural trajectory of ruining the beautiful things,” he said.
Maine
The data center debate has reached the Pine Tree State, too. As in Ohio, several communities in Maine may constrain data center development via ballot measure.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a long-serving moderate Republican who supported Husted’s Ratepayer Protection Act, was interrupted by a protester during her Oct. 15 debate with her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson.
The protester shouted that data centers would be “destroying our climate” and “poisoning our water.” The interruption prompted Collins to claim that the protester was a Jackson supporter. Jackson then told her to “shut up.”
Jackson, a former state senator and former president of the Maine Senate, has called for significant government regulation of data centers and AI.
At the Pumpkin Harvest Festival in Saco, Bobby Charles, Maine’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, told The Epoch Times he is “kind of agnostic” on data centers.
“I need to get experts to tell me what the information is,” he added.
His Democratic opponent, Hannah Pingree, supported the moratorium on building large data centers that was vetoed by the current Maine Gov. Janet Mills, also a Democrat.
Ashley Hyder, a paralegal in Portland who was attending the festival, suggested she was undecided between Collins and Jackson for the Senate.
“I do not like the idea of data centers coming into the state,” she said, adding that it feels like AI is “everywhere already.”
Another festival-goer, Di Hamlin, wore a Democratic pin.
“Sadly, I like ChatGPT,” she confessed, saying OpenAI’s chatbot had helped her repair her refrigerator.
She said she was worried about AI “building the next nuclear bomb and then [making] its own decision to press the button.”
Kirsten, who lives near Freeport and asked to go by her first name only, also referenced nuclear bombs, telling The Epoch Times that “we need the kind of innovation and diplomacy that we saw during the times of nuclear ramping up, and we’re not seeing that now.”
Kirsten, who backed Graham Platner in the Democratic Senate primary but now supports Jackson, said she sees the value of AI “but not if it’s not well regulated.”
Scott, who also declined to share his last name, was smoking a cigarette outside the Maine Snowmobile Association’s Snowmobile and Powersports Show in Augusta.
The Maine voter, who wants a change from Mills in the governor’s mansion and worries about the impact of illegal immigration, said he did not yet have enough information to opine about data centers.
“I’ve heard there [are] some issues with powering them,” he said.
Other Issues
The results of the midterms could shape how Congress responds to data centers, AI, and related issues—though other issues might come first for voters.
“It is too early to see these as decisive partisan issues that either side can get any advantage on compared to the issues of the economy, affordability, inflation, the Iran War, and ICE and immigration,” Robert Y. Shapiro, a Columbia University professor of political science and international affairs, told The Epoch Times.
An October analysis from Infrastructure for America found that data centers have appeared in just 5 percent of political ads in ten major battleground races.
More than a few voters told The Epoch Times they did not know enough about the data center debate to offer an opinion.
Everley said “there is a pretty sizable gap between the broader media narrative about a ‘data center election’ and what polling data actually show us about voter sentiment and voter priorities.”
Yet, he does not believe the ongoing backlash can be totally chalked up to the influence of foreign governments, something venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale and others have blamed.
“It would be a big mistake to just dismiss all of the concerns and all of the questions that are being raised as just some sort of foreign psychological operation,” he said.
Like Americans in Texas, Ohio, and Maine, those in Nebraska, Illinois, Colorado, and Georgia voiced concerns about data centers and AI to The Epoch Times.
Not all of them were opposed to the data center buildout—at least under the right circumstances.
Greg Justice, a Republican in Georgia, told The Epoch Times that “we need to be very wise” and informed in building data centers, saying he’s heard opposition to a local project from people who don’t yet know anything about it.
Justice said that specific data center was slated for open space, not in “the field next to me.”
“Let’s go for it,” he added.
Troy Myers and Michael Clements contributed to this report.
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